


Landslide

by concertconfetti



Category: Dark Souls (Video Games)
Genre: Gen, Vent Writing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-14
Updated: 2018-12-14
Packaged: 2019-09-18 00:26:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 789
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16984653
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/concertconfetti/pseuds/concertconfetti
Summary: The man she’d killed lay in the ruins above the Blacksmith, back in the Undead Parish. Getting there required little of the repetition she to which she had become accustomed - simply retrace her hurried steps back through the church.





	Landslide

She’d killed him. His form crumpled around her sword and slumped to the ground as she slowly removed the blade. Blood dripped off the edges. Red stained where there was usually black, sticky residue. She stared at the body for a moment, her fingers trembling, before sprinting back to Firelink.

Metal boots clacked against the aging stone of the cathedral. Nika could hear the rumblings of Hollows groaning on the second floor as she crashed into the elevator. The great tree of the Firelink shrine panned slowly up through her vision. The green of the shrine always struck her - that such beauty and calm could exist in this lonely corner of the world normally calmed her. Today, the moss looked soggy, dripping through the crags of the crumbling ruin.

Nika was human, for the moment, but the edges of undeath clung to her sides and itched. One small slip and she’d be Hollow, lost forever in the lands of Lordran. Sometimes she’d wished she’d stayed at the Asylum (though, upon returning there once, she never wished to see it’s walls again). She wore the armaments of a Knight, picked up from an Astoran corpse in the Darkroot Forest. Her shield, too, was of Astora - looted from that man who freed her. (He’d gone hollow in her absence.) The thin side-sword at her side was won off of a Baulder Knight, one of the guardians of the Undead Parish. It clacked against her side now, staining the fabric over her armor with blood.

“Running from something?” Crestfallen asked, a hint of a smile in his voice. He was sitting, as ever, just to the right of the bonfire. Nika was surprised he hadn’t grown moss of his own yet. “I told you, it’d be nothing but trouble if you left. But did you listen?” 

“I have no time for this,” Nika mumbled, sitting at the bonfire for but a moment -enough to reset. What happened at bonfires, Nika could not really describe. The world went quiet and for a moment, she felt as if she died. Properly died. Everything left her, all the heartache, pain and misery. But, when she stood, it all came rushing back. 

The man she’d killed lay in the ruins above the Blacksmith, back in the Undead Parish. Getting there required little of the repetition she to which she had become accustomed - simply retrace her hurried steps back through the church. She walked quietly past the fretting friar (Nika never could remember his name, and had taken to calling him Bowl-cut) toward the elevator. It clicked a whirred to life, as if it had been resting for years not moments, pulling toward the parish. This return path had long become rote: lure one soldier away from the others; wait for him to pull back; parry, stab; and repeat. Simple. Tragically simple.

What Nika had been hoping to find in the ruin, she could not say. But there he lay, folded in on himself. Dead. Human. The man, clad in iron armor, had not returned with the rest of the undead. Nika’s suspicion had been correct.

She righted the corpse, pressed him up against the wall and removed his helmet. The man had short, dusty brown hair and the beginnings of a beard clinging to his face. Blue eyes stared out at her. Blood congealed on the stone under him. Nika held the man’s face up and let it drop; she knew him.

This was a man she had spent some months with before her first death. She’d loved him. He’d left her when she revealed she was undead. Nika examined his lanky body carefully until she found it. There was a band around his left finger. Apparently, the man who’d always told her he’d never married had taken a wife. The pain - heartache - burned in Nika’s chest, though she knew it was unreasonable.

But what had he been doing in Lordran? The only other humans she’d encountered were the black knights of Anor Londo, the ones sent to wipe out the armies of the Undead. This man was no knight. She stood over him, shaking because nothing made sense. He was here, a land of the accursed, and he had attacked her. Had her former love not recognized her? She, certainly, had not recognized him. How long had she been here?

She’d killed him.

Nika was human, for now, but her first death was well behind her. Each day, larger rocks slipped in the rockslide of her sanity. At any time, she could lose herself completely. Now, sitting at the fire above Andre’s anvil, she wept for a man that had hurt her in life. She’d killed him, and she wept for her lack of guilt.


End file.
